The power of medicine has lately enhanced the idea of medicalizing any aspects of life that can be perceived as medical problems. Medicine sometimes creates false needs and there is nowadays an increasing number of situations are medicalized with the pretext of treating fake diseases such as spring fatigue, shyness o natural biological processes like menopause. Despite the better life conditions, we now attend more people that complain about discomfort that may have more to do with «feeling sick» than with authentic disease. There is an endless list: sadness, hyperactive children, anorexia, bulimia, vigorexia or problematic teenagers, amongst others. In this article we revise some interventions that, contribute to promote these situations also from the own doctor's office. Everyday adversity acquires today the status of disease, hence the remarkable increase in these consultations in the diverse sanitary services.
Western societies have displaced problems from the subjective and social fields over to medicine, and the search for the perfect health has become an obsession and a pathogenic predominant factor. Paradoxically, the number of ilnesses and sick people arises proportionally with health levels. We now tend to add «disease labels» in daily clinical practice to behaviors and events that are nothing but elements of character or even healthy reactions to laboral and familial conflicts or mourning. In this article, we analyze the factors that determine this «medicalization» process and its consequences, with a particular emphasis in the iatrogenesis of unnecessary medical interventions.
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